The Child and Family Research Section (CFRS) investigates dispositional, experiential, and environmental factors that contribute to physical, mental, emotional, and social development in human beings during the first two decades of life course. The overall goals of research in the CFRS are to describe, analyze, and assess the capabilities and proclivities of developing children, including their genetic characteristics, physiological functioning, perceptual and cognitive abilities, emotional, social, and interactional styles, as well as the nature and consequences for children and parents of family development, and children's exposure to and interactions with their physical surroundings. Project designs are experimental, longitudinal, and cross-sectional as well as intra-cultural and cross-cultural. Sociodemographic comparisons include family socioeconomic status, maternal age and employment status, and child parity and daycare experience. Study sites include Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Cameroon, Canada, England, France, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Peru, and the Republic of South Korea as well as the United States. The CFRS is broadly concerned with analyzing and understanding the roles of parenting in human development. Methodological assessments of parenting sometimes show similar, sometimes different patterns of findings reflective of different approaches to the same problem. In one study, frequencies of behaviors of mothers and infants in two cultures based on continuous coding were compared with frequencies based on time-sampling, and resulting patterns of findings were evaluated. Time-sampling and continuous coding gave different estimates of absolute frequency of typical maternal and infant behaviors between individuals and between cultural groups. However, time-sampling adequately preserved the relative ranking of mother and infant behaviors among individuals and between cultural groups. If research is concerned with the relative standing of individuals and/or groups on frequency of maternal or infant behaviors, then (under specified circumstances) time-sampling and continuous coding yield comparable results. America is a country composed of acculturating peoples; the countries of origin of those acculturating peoples are constantly changing; and the nature of acculturation itself is elusive. Current U.S. Census statistics indicate that one out of every five children under the age of 18, or 14 million children, in the United States are either immigrants themselves or the children of immigrant parents. Yet acculturation as a scientific phenomenon is not well understood; moreover, acculturation is a major transforming force on child health and human development. In the CFRS we study families acculturating to the U.S. from Japan and from South America. We assess acculturation and the role of acculturation on parenting, child development, and family life. The capacity to categorize objects, events, and other aspects of experience lies at the core of adaptive, intelligent behavior. In this context, categorization refers to the treatment of discriminable entities as equivalent in some way. Without this ability, every distinct encounter with the environment would demand a unique response, a demand that would quickly exceed human capability. When treating similar entities as equivalent, functionally relevant information about each one can be stored in a unified manner instead of being stored redundantly across each instance. Furthermore, accessing the representations that are associated with a given category can furnish information about completely novel entities as soon as those entities are categorized. Thus, categorization not only grants an economical manner in which to organize knowledge and skill, but also allows us to extend that knowledge and skill beyond the limits of our own direct experience. Because of its far-reaching adaptive significance, research in the CFRS is concerned with the origins and early development of categorization. An accumulation of evidence now indicates that human infants are surprisingly capable of formulating and representing categories of visual information.